Oz or Bust

Our garden hasn't even been planted a week and it was just put to one of the biggest tests of its short life: It survived its first natural disaster. We were driving home from the grocery store yesterday and commenting on the very black ominous sky off to the South. It was raining and getting dark, but then things got scary quickly. Swirling winds were moving our very heavy Yukon Denali back and forth on the road. Leaves, twigs and very large leaf-covered branches were flying in a circular motion around the car. The air was grey with debris and the car was almost unmanageable.

Farmer B and I immediately assumed that we were on the edge of a large tornado. We drove home as fast as we could, dodging downed trees and branches. We saw large oak trees severed in half and the winds were outrageous. When we got home we could barely close the doors to the car because the wind was so strong. We carried the boys as we ran to the house, getting whipped by the wind and small debris. When we got inside, our entryway was covered in a layer of water from the insane winds blowing the rain underneath our front doorway. Our house alarm was going off and the dogs were scared from all the noise. We glanced into our backyard and saw three trees that had fallen down. Once it all passed we looked out front and found another tree had blown down. The fence between our house and our neighbor's house was down - along with most of his fence too.

I took a short drive around our neighborhood to see how it looked and other than many downed trees, basketball hoops, fences, flagpoles and missing sheds everything seemed okay. The local weather guys are calling it a microburst, which I can tell you feels a heckuvalot like a tornado.


But the most important tidbit? The garden fared well! Cyril the Gnome fell down at his post, but the garden actually looked great. I'm glad we didn't release the ladybugs into the garden the previous night because I'm sure they would have been blown away. We actually have some string bean sprouts coming up and the pumpkin sprouts are even bigger. I have no idea why the garden looks better after such a harrowing weather day, but it does. The gardening gods were definitely on our side.

Farmer B and Aidan spent the afternoon cleaning up the yard. One of our biggest trees fell over and it took a lot of cutting with the chain saw to get it small enough to load up in the trailer to haul away. (Farmer B predicted that this tree would fall and tied it to another tree with a rope last week so that it wouldn’t hit our house when it fell - I'll explain this premonition in a later post).



It turns out that the dog gets really silly when he smells fresh sawdust that's spit out of the back of a hot chainsaw. I will just add this to the long list of quirks about that creature.

And how did the night end? With a lightning strike across the street that caught trees and bushes on fire in an empty lot. The fire department showed up to put it out and the boys got their kicks watching the flashing lights out of the bedroom window.

Can I call it a day? It didn’t look this hard when Dorothy did it. And my little men didn't even sing me the Lollipop Guild song.